Narrante is the highly attractive ECM debut album of Golfam Khayam and Mona Matbou Riahi, otherwise known as the "Naqsh Duo". The guitarist and clarinetist, both born in Tehran, have pursued further musical adventures outside Iran while remaining fascinated and strongly influenced by their homeland’s rich and diverse traditions. In the process they have arrived at synthesis of their own, finding points of contact between aspects of Persian tradition and contemporary music. The forms, modes, drones and rhythms of Persian music as well its call for improvisation are redeployed, to new creative ends, in their fresh and vital work. Narrante was recorded in July 2015 at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano and produced by Manfred Eicher and Ramin Sadighi.

Golfam Khayam’s primary field of activity has been contemporary classical music, which she studied in Tehran and, subsequently, in Cincinnati and Geneva with teachers including Dusan Bogdanovic, Clare Callahan, Nicolas Bolens, Victor Cordero, and Marc-André Rappaz. She has also made studies of traditional Persian music which led her to adapt some of its techniques for the guitar. Jazz, too, has been an inspiration. “I was intrigued by the way in which John Coltrane or Keith Jarrett could just play and create music: the composer and performer are not separate. And in my encounters with traditional music, there was the liberty which the performer has with his palette of colours. It was a challenge and dilemma for me: how can I convey this on my own instrument without fundamentally changing my musical zone?”

Mona Matbou Riahi’s relationship with traditional music has gone through some metamorphoses. Growing up, she heard much of at it home (“my father listened to it all the time, and my mother sang it”), and when she first moved at age 17 to Vienna, had “a teenage revolutionary feeling” of leaving the music decisively behind. “There was a time when my listening consisted just of classical music and rock.” Then jazz singers and instrumentalists became important: Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and more. Encouraged by Vienna-based Brazilian guitarist Alegre Corrêa to participate in local jam sessions, Mona’s interest in improvising took wings. She went on to study improvisation and experimental music at university, participating in courses led by John Tilbury, Burkhard Stangl and others.

“What I really love in improvising is the silence between ideas. I missed it in the jam sessions where everybody was playing all the time, but I found it in free improvisation, this mix of silence and ideas between the sounds: it was a good connection.”

In time, the wish to hear music from Persian sources also reasserted itself. “I started to listen to it with new ears, and not with judgement, a process of learning and searching with freedom. The music from Baluchistan was especially beautiful, really magical to me.” It was in attempting to “imitate the music’s landscape”, that Mona gradually found her own sound on the clarinet. Persian music subsequently informed the repertoire of the groups Gabbeh and Sormeh in which Mona participated. Sormeh recorded an album for Austrian label Lotus, and Mona sent a copy to Golfam Khayam who in turn sent her album Ravi, on the Hermes label, with re-interpretations and improvisations on Dusan Bogdanovic's compositions inspired by Persian poetry and culture.

Mona: “I listened and could really imagine guitar and clarinet together. We were somehow in the same musical space at the same time. When we play we’re like twins, in my eyes and ears. It’s a feeling I never had before meeting Golfam. She might bring in a composition or I might. But very soon her work is my work and vice versa. It’s our work. And it feels to me like writing poetry together.”
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